​Longer laptop battery life? This is Microsoft's answer to the age-old problem

​Longer laptop battery life? This is Microsoft’s answer to the age-old problem

Microsoft researchers Bodhi Priyantha, Ranveer Chandra, and Anirudh Badam are working to extend battery life. Image: Jeremy Mashburn/Microsoft Microsoft researchers think they can answer the riddle to longer life batteries in laptops and tablets – by taking an approach that’s being used to boost performance in the datacentre. Software-defined networking (SDN) has been a hot topic for the past few years for those keen on next-generation datacentre design. Cisco scrambled to figure out its story for the hardware-saving network virtualisation technology, while Google last year launched its own SDN, Andromeda, to optimise networking capabilities and performance on Google Cloud Compute. Similar efforts have been made to abstract key functions from other hardware, such as storage and servers at the datacentre. However engineers at Microsoft Research think the general approach can…